just my 2 cents

Hello,
I'm a happy cthumb 4.2 user, I'm using this program for my digital photo
collections and it's great, so... thank you :)
Now, here it is a bit of feedback, I hope these considerations can be useful
for the development of cthumb.


First of all a bug report: InsertExif=1 doesn't work if the thumbnails are
stored in the thumbs/ directory. I get errors like this:

cthumb 4.2, running in /var/home/piccia/c
	using '800x600' as default slide geometry.
Error : No such file
in file '../dscn0368.jpg'
Updating page:	./thumb/dscn0368-1-0.html
Error : No such file
in file 'dscn0368-1.jpg'
Updating page:	./thumb/dscn0368-1-1.html
Error : No such file
in file '../dscn0369.jpg'
[...]

It all works fine if the thumb directory isn't used. Seems like the
$relURL passed to jhead isn't always correct.


Now some advices about things that, in my opinion, should be better handled:

* InsertExif should insert Exif info only in the page with the original
image. The scaled down versions (obtained specifying different resolutions
with SlidePictureGeometry) don't have exif headers, so the jhead output
contains only generic informations (file name, size, mtime, resolution). But
these are quite useless, if a user specifies InsertExif he wants info about
the camera settings and so on, not info about the file.

* about the time displayed with DisplayFileDate. If the InsertExif option is
used, cthumb displays the time and date taken from the exif info, otherwise
it uses the mtime of the file. Personally I don't like this, the exif time
and the file time are two totally different concepts, so they sholudn't be
confused. For example if I rotate a picture with jpegtran (great tool!) the
file time changes, but the exif time doesn't. It would be nice if the user
could choose if the displayed time is the one taken from the file info or
from the exif info. In the second case, it should be displayed the exif time
even if the user specifies InsertExif=0 ("I don't want full exif
informations, but I want the exif time"... this isn't possible with the
current version of cthumb).

* again on exif infos :). What about using the locale time format even for
the time extracted from exif infos? It should be quite easy to write a
parser that extracts the correct strftime parameters IF jhead output it's
always in the same format. I don't know if the time format displayed by
jhead depends or not from how the time is stored inside the exif header.
Unfortunately I think that date and times are stored in the header as
strings, so their format is probably camera-dependent...


Time for usability considerations:
* In my photo albums I use three versions for each picture: the original
one, a scaled-down (800x600) one and the thumbnails. Generally people don't
look the original pictures since they're too big and don't fit in the
screen, so they look at the scaled down version. But the people want to
1) quickly browse the images through the next/prev arrows 2) immediately see
the full picture, without needing to move the mouse away from "next" arrow to
scroll down the page and see the bottom half of the picture. This is
difficult to achieve since cthumb "wastes" a lot of space in the top of the
page. I have solved this problem
- removing the album name in the "up" link, I think the up arrow 
  is sufficient
- moving the time, the caption and the story BELOW the picture.
I now use this layout, from top to bottom:
-prev/up/next arrows (without album title)
-the picture
-the different resolutions links
-picture caption
-picture date and time
-story
-exif info


Really small and quick-to-fix things:
* I think SlidePictureGeometry and DefaultSlidePictureGeometry are quite
important options, so it would be better to put them -eventually commented
out- in the albums generated via cthumb -c
* StoryFontColor isn't specified in themes, so if you use the default theme
you get a white story on a white background...
* some html attributes aren't enclosed by "", most notably the 
cellpadding/cellspacing table options in the thumbnails page.
I don't know what the html standard says about this.
* thumbleft, thumbright and pixel images don't have an ALT="" attribute.
Did you ever browse a photo album with lynx? ;)))


Other things:
* I don't like very much the time and date field in the thumbnail captions
(just a personal opinion, maybe you like it a lot :))
* what about html code in the story file?
* you surely already know about this: the albums look great with galeon,
but sometimes have "black holes" in the thumbnails page when looked with internet
explorer under windows. It seems that sometimes the table columns are wider
than the specified width because of big captions.


Well, that's all folks :). I hope my opinions can help you in the
development of cthumb. Bye (and excuse me for my bad english :/ )



-- 
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